Fletcher School students carry younger students across Third Street on their backs and in their arms through ankle-deep flood waters from a February 1963 nor'easter. It would be another 25 years before Flood Insurance Rate Maps were established.

BOTTOM: Glass Bar (now Ginger's Place) and Ossi's Food Store, on Third Street South in Jacksonville Beach, is pictured amid flood waters in 1974. The first Flood Insurance Rate Maps didn't come to the Beaches until 1989.

In an area with bodies of water seemingly at every turn — the Atlantic Ocean, the Intracoastal Waterway, the St. Johns River — carrying flood insurance on a house or business is less a suggestion than it is a necessity.

And if you’ve been reading about recent updates and revisions to the federal government’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps, the official map of a community on which FEMA delineates both special hazard areas and risk premium zones, you’re probably wondering how your flood insurance rates might be affected.

You’re not alone.

The new and more accurate maps detailing areas in Duval County that are most susceptible to flooding were released in June, the first revisions to the charts in about two decades. The update stems from the passage of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act that President Obama signed into law on July 6, 2012.

Following the release of the maps, officials from the City of Jacksonville asked area residents to review the newly updated flood risk zones. Many did and wondered exactly what they were seeing and how the changes will translate to an insurance rate. Atlantic Beach Building and Zoning Director Michael Griffin chimed in, calling FEMA’s floodplain maps and programs “a science of their own.”

So, will changes to the maps impact your flood insurance rates?

According to numbers provided by FEMA, the new insurance reform will not affect 87 percent of roughly 1.8 million existing flood policy holders in Florida. Two percent — or 50,496 — of policyholders with Florida’s National Flood Insurance Program saw a 25-percent increase in coverage cost. For others, new rates apply when a property switches owners, “suffers severe repeated flood losses,” or the property’s policy lapses or a new policy is purchased.

SEE YOUR ZONE

■ To get an idea of a flood risk under the revised FIRMs for a Duval County address, visit http://maps.coj.net/MyNeighborhood/, type in an address and click on the “Show Map” link at the top of the page. At the map legend at the bottom of the page, select “Preliminary Flood Zone,” and click on the refresh button and then zoom out using the magnifying glass icon on the bottom of the page.

■ For more news on the proposed changes to the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, visit www.floodsmart.gov.

Before the law passed, a subsidy created “artificially low” rates and discounts for policyholders. In Duval County, 888 subsidized flood policies are expected to be altered as a result of the new FIRMs, while 35,287 unsubsidized policies should remain static until at least 2014 when they too become subject to increases due to possible elevated flood risk charges. However, a delay in the law and revision could cloud that deadline.

Corrine Garrison, vice president of Fletcher Stein insurance in Jacksonville Beach, acknowledges that a lot of confusion has been spurred by the intricacies of the law.

Her advice? Don’t let your current flood insurance lapse.

“The majority of policies that I have written have been grandfathered in,” said Garrison, a Ponte Vedra resident. “But, if [policyholders] ever let it lapse, the rates will change.”

Garrison noted that some condos along First Street in Ponte Vedra Beach have been upgraded in risk to 100-year flood zone, but the owners can keep their existing insurance rates.

The new maps and the subsequent rate changes, Garrison said, are largely for homebuyers and those building new homes. Her best advice for those relocating is to call their agents and let them know the exact address of the new home.

An outline of risk

When arguing for Biggert-Waters, lawmakers and federal officials said that the changes were necessary in order to updated the boundaries of flood-prone regions and to help prevent the types of devastating loss from storms like Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Proponents also said that identifying true flood risks and increased insurance rates would help alleviate FEMA’s $25 billion deficit.

But despite its passage less than two years ago, confusion about the law and its impact on home and business owners has it under fire. One of the bill’s namesakes, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California, is calling for a four-year delay of its rate increase implementation, explaining that the law’s passage brought up “unintended consequences” in terms of insurance affordability. A bill introduced last month by Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, titled The Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act, calls for FEMA to complete an affordability study of the flood insurance rate hikes.

In the meantime, Garrison said the only way to determine exactly how the new mapping will affect a policy is to order an elevation report from a land surveyor, which should cost about $300.

“Nobody can really tell you the rates before that happens,” said Garrison. “It all depends. You can have two pieces of property side by side and they can be in different flood zones.”

Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach, Atlantic Beach and Ponte Vedra Beach are now situated over varying degrees of zones with a likelihood of flood every 500 years — or less than a 0.2 percent annual chance of a flood hazard — and 1 percent annual likelihood or 100-year flood risks designated by the letters A, AE, AO and VE.

VE represents areas subject to 100-year floods and “additional velocity hazard” or wave action, according to FEMA. The AO zone is reserved for sloping terrain with 100-year flood events that cause an average 1- to 3-foot water depth. The AE zone is an area subject to 100-year flood events where a Base Flood Elevation has been determined, while the A zone is similarly a 100-year flood area, but no Base Flood Elevation has been established.

Most of the beach proper is VE territory, as well as the areas immediately surrounding the St. Johns River in Mayport. Oceanfront homes are generally located in A or AO zones, and some neighborhood blocks closest to the ocean are designated AO. Much of the land bordering the Intracoastal Waterway is in zone AE.

According to Griffin, in Atlantic Beach, the changing upgraded and downgraded flood risks under the fledging law is a wash. Approximately .5 square miles of land area — most of it inland — has been upgraded to a higher flood risk; an approximate .5 square miles of higher flood risk area was eliminated during this map revision, reducing the flood risk.

City officials from Neptune Beach and Jacksonville Beach could not provide an estimate of how many miles of Beaches-area land have been upgraded to a higher risk of flooding or downgraded to a lesser flooding risk.

Griffin said he’s received “many calls because folks have been contacted by their insurance company wanting certification from the city showing what flood zone they are in.”

“An increase in the overall area mapped as a flood zone in a city doesn’t automatically correlate to an individual property’s insurance rate,” said Bill Mann, senior planner for Jacksonville Beach.

Mann said the best way to get an idea of what these new flood maps entail, however temporary the resulting insurance rates might be, is to visit the property search page on the Property Appraisers office website, accessible at coj.net. The site directs users to the JaxGIS system, and “current flood zones” is a toggle-able layer in that GIS map system.

The Biggert-Waters Act includes wording to establish a flood insurance rate map advocate within FEMA to field questions from policyholders and make sure insurance agencies are aware of the new boundaries; however, advocates for FEMA Region IV — which includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee and an Atlanta-based main office — were not readily available through phone or email attempts.

Next for Floridians ...

According to a recent report in the Tampa Bay Times, Florida is the hardest-hit state in terms of rising rates of flood insurance, with all unsubsidized property owners facing possible increases of up to 20 percent a year for five years.

Presently, homeowners with subsidized policies face a new 5-percent charge going into a reserve fund created for future flooding losses, while mortgage lenders face significantly higher fines if they finance a home without a policy in an area where one is deemed necessary.

The Florida Board of Realtors reworded its standard sales contract, letting buyers know they may need to obtain a flood certification in order to purchase flood insurance.

State Floodplain Manager Joy Duperault of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said there are no mapping engineers in the state floodplain management office, adding that the number of homes affected by increasing premiums in the Beaches area is “hard to pin down in any simplified way.”